Lied on your resume to get a job? 1 in 10 say ‘Yes’.

Have you ever lied on your resume, in an application, or during an interview to get a job? Some of the common resume lies are about academic degrees, age, technical abilities and criminal records. In interviews, people tend to tell lies related to salaries, references, and complete work history. Getting caught lying can be grounds for firing and yet many people take these risks. We were curious about how many tech workers within our community on Blind have lied in their work lives, so we ran a survey with this statement: True or False: I have embellished or lied on my LinkedIn or resume / CV to help land another job.

The survey was run from 3/22 to 3/28, 2019. The total number of respondents was 10, 364, with 9,356 or 90% selecting False and 1,008 or 10% selecting True.

Of the 17 companies represented in the survey, the one with the highest True rate was SAP with 12.50%. In the second position, with 11.57% choosing True were Amazon employees. Rounding out the top three was Cisco with 10.78%. The fourth position was occupied by PayPal with 10.58%. Ebay was in fifth with just a shade less than 10% at 9.93. Microsoft was sixth with a 9.84% True response rate. Oracle was next at 9.19%. From there, the True rate dips below 9% with Intel at 8.84% and Uber at 8.71%. Quite a bit lower was Google, in the tenth position, at 7.43%.

We’ve talked about the companies represented by the employees who chose True the most, the ones who admitted they embellished or lied. So, what about the companies whose employees selected False the most, who indicated they did not embellish or lie?

At the top of this list was Salesforce with a 97% False rate. Next were employees from Tableau with a 96.3% False rate. Following them were Intuit employees, with 96.26% indicating they had not fibbed. LinkedIn was in the fourth position, with 95.54% selecting False, claiming they had not practiced deception. Apple was close behind with a 94.83% False rate. In the sixth position, at 93.14% was Adobe. The Facebook employees who responded to the embellishment/lie statement in the negative were at 92.68%.

These are very interesting results. A report from 2017 stated that 85% of job applicants were caught by employers using some form of dishonesty. So, perhaps tech workers are more honest than some other types of employees.

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